The entire disclosure of Japanese Patent Application No. 2007-178378, filed Jul. 6, 2007 and Japanese Patent Application No. 2008-118537 filed Apr. 30, 2008 are expressly incorporated herein by reference.
1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a fluid ejecting apparatus. More specifically, the present invention relates to a technique for eliminating clogged nozzles in an fluid ejecting apparatus.
2. Related Art
An ink jet recording apparatus performs a printing process by discharging ink onto a recording sheet through a plurality of nozzles. In some instances, however, when ink becomes thickened in the nozzles or air bubbles are introduced into the nozzles, the nozzles may become clogged, causing them to be able to satisfactorily discharge ink during the printing process. One approach to addressing this problem described in Japanese Patent No. JP-A-6-328702 is an ink jet recording apparatus that is capable of removing air bubbles or thickened ink in the nozzles using a suction process, wherein a negative pressure is created within a dedicated cap that covers the discharge surface of the recording head.
In some instances, the ink jet recording apparatus performs a suction operation on all nozzles simultaneously. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to create a large amount of negative pressure or suction power. For example, when a line recording head is used, several thousand nozzles may be cleaned in a single operation, meaning that a large amount of negative pressure is needed. Thus, the pump for creating the negative pressure is inevitably large, which increases the size and cost of the ink jet recording apparatus.
Similar problems exist when the fluid ejecting apparatus has a serial-recording head. Thus, there is a need for a fluid ejecting apparatus that is capable of efficiently cleaning the nozzles more efficiently.